An Obligation

There is no doubt you have to feel a great deal of sorrow and outrage when you travel this county after a good rain.

Stormwater management seems like a foreign concept to the detriment of ordinary folks.

Travel over to St. Joseph Shores and the closest homes to WindMark Beach development and you will find residents who have lived there decades suddenly losing their homes, and there is no other way to put it, to the water every time it rains.

The two closest homes to WindMark have their backyards transformed into lakes, lakes that do not recede overnight and which bring with them damage, clean-up and angst.

For the county to assert distance from the issue, one that is every bit as important to the county and its residents as reinforcement projects and redrawing of Coastal Construction Control Lines that have commissioners so outraged, is a shame.

All one resident asked of the county was a survey of her property, something she could not afford, to demonstrate what has happened to the water table and the impacts from WindMark Beach development.

The reply – no money, even though the cost of that survey could have been borne in November alone with the way commissioners piddled away taxpayer dollars for newspaper advertisements out of the county.

Or travel over to Cape San Blas and the section of County 30-E from the Jubilation subdivision to Indian Pass and you have a patchwork of development in which neighbors are fighting each other, the county and the state for some relief from stormwater inundation that seems to occur after every heavy rain.

There is one property development smack in the middle of this section which acts as the crown on a football field, everything flowing downhill onto other properties on both sides.

And this development consists of nothing, the cratering of real estate several years ago and other factors leading to bankruptcy, court and a clear-cut section of the Cape that is causing havoc all about.

And here is the real problem with the state agencies that commissioners so bemoan; the random application of rules.

The biomass plant proposed for Port St. Joe is undergoing a rigorous examination of stormwater management issues as part of the permitting process, but somehow this kind of oversight or requirement is not made by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection when it comes to residential development in an environmentally-sensitive area.

The Army Corps of Engineers can hold up stabilization work at the Chipola cutoff, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service can protect a beach mouse in what seem extreme measures and the DEP can redraw the Coastal Construction Control Line (CCCL) on the peninsula.

But where was this sensitivity to the environment and desire for regulation when it came to development on the peninsula or at WindMark Beach?

Nowhere and now real people are being hurt.

This isn’t a conservative or liberal issue, though some will spend their dying breaths making it so. This isn’t about Tea Party protestors or outrage about the current governor or president.

Because this kind of bureaucracy, this kind of random red tape, has been part of daily life for decades, created and nurtured by governors and presidents, Democrat and Republican alike.

But the most important aspect of this discussion is simple: property rights extend to the point where one is impacting neighboring properties.

What is happening at St. Joseph Shores is an outrage. What is happening along County 30-E between Jubilation and Indian Pass is an outrage.

People’s homes, their lives, are being damaged because of a lack of proper stormwater management and folks with deeper pockets or the power enabling them to ignore.

And these should not be insignificant areas for the county, since the tax revenue generated in these areas constitutes a healthy percentage of ad valorem taxes in the county.

Commissioners were warned some time ago about killing the goose that laid the golden egg that the county sat on in prosperity in the early years of this decade.

Now that goose is under water, drowning due to a lack of empathy, leadership, proactive governance, take your pick.

The county thinks it has money problems now, wait until people just decide that the property tax burden and stormwater flooding their homes is no longer worth the price of admission in the county.

However, this is about more than property taxes or development or property rights, this is about people’s lives.

People are seeing their homes undermined and damaged, their lives changed, their living expenses expanded due to frequent clean-up and replacement of damaged property because somebody had deeper pockets, more attorneys or better connections to the halls of power.

This is how the game is played.

The net ban and the current outrage over fishing regulations stands as a history lesson of how money and lobbying can bring about change and unbalance the scales, whether an entire industry or individual lives are hurt.

But the county has a role here and should play it more astutely and aggressively.

These aren’t just people; these are the folks commissioners have sworn to serve. These are constituents, if one is to believe the assertion of county commissioners that they all have an eye on the entire county.

If that is the case, the next county meeting should be held at Jubilation or at St. Joseph Shores. If commissioners think loose dogs are a problem, as in Howard Creek which called for a workshop some weeks back, let the residents in those areas show the havoc loose stormwater can wreak on a community.

The state has chosen to turn a blind eye to the impacts of what it has done to this county.

County commissioners really no longer have that luxury – unless they are prepared to pick up the tab for the costs being paid by ordinary people just trying to survive in a world that suddenly feels like the deck of the sinking Titanic.